The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “You”ve already given me one, for the last job.”

  Mo bit his lip.

  “Make it a diplomatic Somali passport.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”

  “A holiday to the Seychelles.”

  “And...?”

  Mo drew his hand down his graying goatee beard.

  “All right,” he said coldly, “I’ll give you breakfast with Idi Amin.”

  A week later Mo was killed, and with his untimely death went my chance of sharing a meal with the infamous Ugandan dictator.

  The jailer woke me at dawn with a cup of freshly roasted coffee. He said that if he’d made it too sweet, I was to tell him and he’d try again. The other felons were asleep, all except for the one the others called Wossen. Samson said he had been drinking all night. The liquor had been smuggled in by the jailer as a reward for good behavior. Wossen’s right eye was milky white and suppurating. Every so often a fly would land on it but Wossen had given up trying to brush it away. He was too old, too tired, too drunk.

  The night had been uncomfortable but not unbearable. My bags were locked away in the office but the jailer had provided some hay for our heads. He had even offered to wash our clothes, though it would take three days to dry them now that the rains had come. I thanked him but said we hoped to be released long before then. The jailer responded, saying there was little hope of us being given an early release.

  At about eleven o’clock the official ordered us to come to the office. He was dressed in the same purple pants as the day before, but his shoes had been expertly cleaned and they now shone. To lighten the mood, I thanked him for having looked after us so well. The experience had been absorbing, I said, but now we were ready to leave.

  The official slapped his hand down on the desk and ordered me to be quiet. He would ask the questions and we were to answer them. But before the interrogation could continue, he wanted to look through our bags. Samson was to show his first. The tartan Chinese case was placed on the table and unpacked. The parrot-green Rubber boots were brought out, then the three-piece suit. The official frowned.

  “Now unlock your bags,” he said, pointing at me.

  Most Ethiopians travel with only the bare necessities. If they bring along any luxuries at all, they’re usually intended as gifts for relatives or friends. But, as every African checkpoint guard knows, foreigners carry with them all sorts of appealing objects, and I am no exception. Fearful of leaving a key piece of equipment or an important book behind, I travel with just about everything I own. Unlocking the kit bags’ padlocks, I began to remove an assortment of items. First came a plug of soggy, mud-ridden clothes, then a few books on Ethiopian history and on the business of gold. The official rifled through the mounting pile, searching for subversive material, and as he did so his face darkened. Clearly he thought I was a spy, and I began to get worried. At the bottom of one kitbag, I knew, there was something that would confirm his suspicions.

  In London I had bought an expensive metal detector. So far I hadn’t even shown it to Samson. The detector – called a Gold Bug II — looked like the sort of thing James Bond would take along on a mission. I had planned to try it out at the mine, but I hadn’t had time.

  I mumbled that there was nothing left in the first bag and started to take out the contents of the other. The bureaucrat knew that I was lying. He plunged his hand in and triumphantly pulled out various bits of the detector. Then he laid the pieces on the table and told me to assemble the device. As I did so, I tried to explain why I needed it, but the official wasn’t listening. He had found a foreign spy and he was clearly already thinking about the likelihood of promotion. Samson glared at me, furious that I’d kept all knowledge of the device from him.

  The official picked up the telephone and barked into the receiver for a minute or two. I couldn’t understand the conversation, but I could guess its drift. A pair of spies had been found, he was telling his boss. One of them’s a sly foreigner caught red-handed with illegal equipment. The other’s a local, an Amhara found in possession of a suspicious three-piece suit.

  After the call, the official smoothed a hand down his shirt-front, pressed his fingertips together, and said something in Amharic. Samson was led away. Sweating profusely, his hands trembling, he was unable to look me in the eye. Then I was marched back to the cell. Samson wasn’t there. I sat against the far wall, away from the others. The thrill of incarceration was beginning to wear thin. The jailer motioned with his hands and mouth, asking if I’d like some lunch. I shook my head. Now, I said in English, wasn’t the time for eating.

  Again I found myself wondering how to get away. We probably could have escaped, but they had Samson’s identity card and would have hunted him down. The thought of Samson being hunted by anyone seemed unfair. Mo Amin had always told me to remain calm in a tight spot. Calmness, he used to say, buys you time. He was a great believer in allowing events to take their course. Solutions, he’d say, present themselves if you give them time. But sitting in a small-town cell was a waste of time. Ϊ had things to do. I had Solomon’s mines to find.

  Then I remembered the advice of another friend. When you’re in a scrape, she said, the best thing to do is the unexpected. A seasoned opponent of Apartheid in South Africa, she’d once found herself in the midst of a riot in Johannesburg. A vigilante mob had surrounded her car and was rocking it from side to side. She was running out of time. Another minute and she’d be dead. So, instead of screaming or showing fear, she blew the vigilantes kisses. They looked horrified and ran away.

  Samson was brought back to the cell a few hours later by a man I’d not seen before. He introduced himself as the commander of the region, and asked some basic questions in English. What was I doing in Ethiopia? Why did I need such a high-tech piece of equipment? What had I seen at the mines? Was I a spy?

  As before I answered truthfully. Samson and I, I said, were searching for King Solomon’s gold mines. We were not interested in buying gold but rather in its cultural and historical importance. The man rubbed his eyes and then he smiled.

  “Are you from America?” he asked.

  “No, from England.”

  “I want to go to America,” he said. “Can you give me some advice?”

  At first I was wary, suspecting some kind of ploy to get information out of me, but then I realized the man’s inquiry was genuine. So I scribbled out some suggestions on a sheet of paper. He thanked me and asked if there was anything he could do to help. I pointed at the cell door.

  “You could open that,” I said.

  Without a second thought he snapped his fingers. The door swung open from behind. The official, who was pacing up and down in the hallway, scowled as we strode past him. Samson was given back his identity card and our possessions were loaded into the commander’s car. He had insisted that his driver take us to Kebra Mengist.

  There seemed little hope of gaining entry to the legal gold mine at the nearby Lega Dembi plant, but Samson urged me to follow up my letter with a phone call. To my great surprise, my call was put straight through and I found myself talking to the managing director of Midroc operations. By the end of the conversation I had been invited to tour the legal gold mine, and even to stay at Midroc’s headquarters, a few miles from Kebra Mengist.

  At the gatehouse, our identity papers were inspected. One of the armed guards spat our names into a walkie-talkie and listened to the crackling reply. Then the barrier slowly lifted and, as it did so, the guards stood to attention and saluted. In the pick-up truck that had brought us from Kebra Mengist we rolled ahead into a vast compound. Only hours before Samson and I had been locked up in a cell with convicts. Now our luck had miraculously changed.

  Lega Dembi was laid out on a grand scale. From the gatehouse to the actual mine was a distance of about two miles. The plant’s perimeter fence was festooned with razor-wire and punctuated at intervals by sentry posts, each manned by soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. We heard later that there was
also a special paramilitary squad that roamed the grounds, searching for intruders.

  The road snaked down into a valley, before climbing steeply. We passed a series of enormous pools, where tailings were being processed and then, as the route ascended, we caught our first glimpse of the plant. There were storage depots and power-generation units, mills and foundries, warehouses and rows of geological laboratories. And everywhere there were tracks leading in all directions on which towering Caterpillar crushers and tippers drove at speed.

  A well-built man dressed in khaki and wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses strode out of his office to greet us. His name was Wayne and he was Australian. He said he couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Lega Dembi. I told him about my search for Solomon’s mines and then I asked him about the gold.

  “You”ve come to the right place for gold,” he said, “but we don’t mine it like Solomon’s slaves would have done. We use ammonium nitrate.” He paused. “I don’t think Solomon had any of that.”

  As Wayne drove us to the mine, he admitted that in the gold business you can’t like gold too much. If you do, he said, you get greedy, and if you get greedy, you make mistakes.

  Five minutes later we stood on a ridge above the lip of a vast crater. Below us lay an enormous mine, so big that it made me shiver. A dozen trucks were being loaded with rocks. When they were full they’d hurry away through deep mud to the crushing plant. I was surprised to see that some of the biggest trucks were being driven by women. Midroc was an equal opportunities employer.

  On one side of the crater a group of men in yellow hard hats were busily unloading boxes guarded by a man with an AK-47.

  “That’s the ammonium nitrate,” said Wayne. “It can blow a mountain into dust, but actually it’s just fertilizer.”

  “What about the bullion?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Wayne took us to the gold room where the molten metal was about to be poured. Once through the rigorous security system, we were locked into what was really a large workshop. The walls were whitewashed breeze blocks, the floor was bare cement, and the ceiling was made from reinforced glass. A pair of security cameras watched our movements. At the far end of the room a technician was checking over the electric furnace. I could clearly see through his mask the beads of sweat joining up on his brow. He looked worried, but tried to maintain an air of professionalism. From twenty feet away I felt the heat. An extractor fan on the back wall seemed to be blowing the hot air towards us. It felt like the parched wind which rips across the Sahara in June. Wayne said things would get much hotter; and then they did. We dressed up in protective silver outfits, like astronauts, donning masks and gloves. Then we crowded round and winced as our bodies were washed in boiling sweat beneath the silver suits. The furnace was the shape of a very large barrel. It was tipped by a system of hand cranks. Gradually a steady semi-molten flow poured out that reminded me of lava spewing from a volcano. Then the flow changed to a stream of liquid gold. Wayne said that the slag ran off first, followed closely by the molten gold.

  Five minutes later the ingots were thrown on to the concrete floor, and the bullion was knocked out like loaves of bread from their baking tins. Lega Dembi is considered a medium-sized plant, and it produces about three hundred and fifty gold bars a year. A single bar of the bullion weighs about 2olbs and is worth approximately $80,000. Given the extent of its reserves, Ethiopia could yield much more if international investors came forward. I found myself thinking about the gold and whether it might be the key to reviving Ethiopia’s economy. As I pondered the question, the rough blackened ingots were whacked with a hammer. The surrounding crust of slag fell away, and for the first time I saw the glint of pure gold.

  The next morning Samson and I huddled in a doorway out of the rain, waiting for the bus to Addis Ababa. An elderly man was crouched on a stool opposite. His pants were too tight, and they were ripped at the knees, and his shirt was split. Every so often, his body trembled and his limbs twitched. Samson said he was called Old One” because he’d been an old man even in his youth. He had a penchant for whipping small boys with a long leather switch, and children would creep up from behind, baiting him. But now his eyesight was fading and his aim was less accurate than it had once been. Like an aged bulldog that’s lost its teeth, Old One was a pathetic sight.

  After four hours the bus arrived and we clambered on board. As we pulled out of town, I noticed a tall athletic man running alongside the bus. He was calling out a woman’s name, and he had taken off his shoes so he could run faster.

  “Who’s he?”

  Samson asked one of the other passengers.

  “His wife is running away with another man,” he said.

  The bus driver had a severe bladder disorder which forced him to stop and pee in the bushes every few minutes. His affliction, coupled with the low speed of the bus, made the vehicle the worst means of escape imaginable. The adulterous woman must have been cursing herself for ever having climbed aboard. At the third pee-stop her husband caught up with the bus and dragged her off by her hair.

  That evening back in Addis Ababa, we went to the Sheraton to celebrate. The hotel was yet another of Mr Amoudi s investments and rumor had it that he’d paid $100 million to build the place. Now it was full of foreign aid workers, all on expense accounts and all earning magnificent tax-free salaries. They appeared especially keen on the French restaurant where they could dine on lobster thermidor, Scottish smoked salmon and foie gras imported from Fauchon in Paris. Ethiopians in the restaurants or bars were few and far between, but young courting couples liked to stroll along the hotel’s palatial corridors and walk hand in hand in the gardens.

  At the buffet Samson piled a spectacular amount of food on to a soup bowl. It was the first time he’d been in the Sheraton but, despite eating his body weight in cooked meat, he said the food wasn’t anything special. In fact he had said very little since our incarceration in jail, though he thought our release was due to God answering his prayers. We were friends and would remain so, but I sensed he had lost faith in me.

  Now that I’d seen an illegal mine in operation, I had some inkling of how gold must have been mined in Solomon’s time. But I was captivated by the idea of Frank Hayter’s lost mine-shafts on the remote mountain of Tullu Wallel in western Ethiopia. And besides, I still had to investigate the five spots on the map where I’d laid my pebbles – places which might yet yield answers to the riddle of Solomon’s mines.

  Over dessert I introduced the subject of continuing the search. Samson put down his spoon, covered his eyes with his hands, and sighed.

  “We have been to the illegal gold mines,” he said.

  “They’re like Solomon’s mines would have been, but they are working a new seam,” I explained. “Ophir must have been further to the west.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve still got five other places to visit,” I said, sidestepping the question. “How can we stop now? We haven’t even been to Frank Hayter’s mine yet.”

  Samson peeped through his fingers.

  “We?” he asked.

  The only way I could talk Samson into coming with me was by promising that I’d hire a vehicle for the rest of the trip. Local buses, said Samson, were hard on the buttocks and far too slow. My budget was limited, and I’d heard that renting a 4x4 in Ethiopia was fiendishly expensive, but Samson insisted that with his contacts we’d get a great deal. The next morning he set off to find a car while I went to meet a gold merchant in the Mercato area of town. The man who cleaned the lavatories in the Hotel Ghion had put the business card of the goldsmith on my bed. His name was Abdul Majeed, which means “the Servant of the Glorious” in Arabic, and his shop was called “Solomon’s Gold”.

  When I reached the goldsmith’s street I found it was lined with dozens of small jewellery shops. In the gutters outside, men squatted over primitive stoves on which crucibles rested. The sight reminded me of the ghamelawallas in India who pay goldsm
iths for the dust they sweep from their workshop floors. In Calcutta alone there are more than a hundred thousand men, women and children who work as ghamelawallas, all retrieving minuscule particles of gold from the dirt.

  When I entered his shop, Abdul Majeed stood up, blew on his palm, and extended it for me to shake. His teeth were capped and his nostrils were flared, and he wore a skull-cap embroidered with tarnished gold thread. When he spoke, he leant forward until his mouth was no more than an inch from mine. Abdul Majeed had extremely bad breath.

  Making it clear from the start that I hadn’t come to buy, I asked what he knew about Solomon’s mines. He invited me to sit, before sliding over a glass of weak tea.

  “First the refreshment,” he said, “and afterwards the chatter.”

  We sat for a few minutes in silent contemplation, sipping our milky tea. I glanced around the small shop. A series of well-built mahogany display cases covered the back wall. Their shelves were lined with green velvet that had been faded by years of sunlight. Against an adjacent wall stood an elegant grandfather clock, made in Hamburg. Opposite that hung a calendar, illustrated with a picture of the Empire State Building and opened at the page for April 1993. When it comes to time, Ethiopia has its own rules which place it in a sort of parallel universe. Instead of following the Gregorian system, as we do in the West, Ethiopians use the Julian calendar, a system seven years and eight months behind us. In Ethiopia there are twelve months, each of thirty days, and a thirteenth month of just five days. Every year thousands of unsold Western calendars are shipped to Addis Ababa, stored for seven years, and then sold to people like Abdul Majeed.

  The shopkeeper served me a second cup of tea and we continued to sit in silence. Then, the refreshment over, he began to speak.

  “Gold,” he said pensively, “I could talk on the subject for a lifetime and would still not have begun.”

  “Do you have any advice for a seeker of Solomon’s mines?”

  “If you want an answer,” said Abdul Majeed, leaning towards me, “you have to consider much more than Solomon. You have to think about the ancient trade routes, the politics, and the reasons why Solomon needed gold.”